Urban Survival Guide – Not What You Might Expect

As I have often lamented, most survival guides assume you will be escaping to some sort of wilderness setting. They assume you are in great shape. They assume you have had training as a boy scout or have at least spent time camping. They don’t seem to accommodate small children, pets or whiners.

That’s why I was pleased to dig into Urban Survival Guide. Yes, it has a lot of the expected suggestions for assembling a supply of food, tools, etc. But it has other themes that aren’t always expected. They really appealed to me.

• First, as the title suggests, this is a guide for surviving a disaster in an urban setting. Not exactly high-rise-condo-downtown-New-York-City urban, but certainly somewhere where you can’t just strap on your pack and set off for the wilderness. (If wilderness survival skills are what you’re looking for, check out last month’s favorite, The Survival Handbook.)
• Second, as to me seems most logical for an urban disaster scenario, the Urban Survival Guide stresses shelter in place instead of bugging out. In fact, the author has trade-marked his own term: SurviveInPlace ™
• Third, David Morris spends a lot of time on the Psychology of Survival. In fact, he threads this throughout — not just how to be physically prepared for the disaster when it hits, but what to expect and how to cope when things don’t get better, and in fact get worse. He addresses not just social issues (thieves, muggings) but also economic (money) and medical disaster possibilities (chemical, biological, pandemics). With over 400 pages, he has the room to develop these themes in sobering and useful, not just theoretical, detail.

Two other aspects of Urban Survival Guide that I value

Morris created a course that was the basis for the book. He assumed the reader would work through the course and the book chapter by chapter, taking advantage of “assignments” for each section. I’m a big believer in the step-by-step approach myself, so this was exactly the way I would have written the Urban Survival Guide if I had that particular knowledge!

Finally, for all the excellent suggestions for hiding your supplies, dodging threatening gangs, and generally keeping a very low profile (He terms it “boring.”), Morris does admit that getting neighbors on board is important. In fact, the whole of Chapter 7 is devoted to that.

And, as you know if you’ve been keeping up with our adventures at EmergencyPlanGuide.org, our entire thesis is that we are all in this together, so the better prepared we all are, the safer we all will be!

And one intriguing fact . . .

I bet you’re like me in that you like to find out more about the authors you read. After finding the Urban Survival Guide I searched for more about David Morris.

And ran right into a wall.

No picture on Amazon. No real info on LinkedIn. I finally put a few vague clues together to surmise that David Morris is a firearms expert having developed training techniques used by law enforcement and the military. But I couldn’t swear to it . . .!

Get the book and see what you discover! Here’s the link to Amazon:

Urban Survival Guide: Learn The Secrets Of Urban Survival To Keep You Alive After Man-Made Disasters, Natural Disasters, and Breakdowns In Civil Order

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